Someday Gmail is going to have a catastrophic loss that's beyond parity bit recovery.
Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back
61–70 of 93 posts
Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back
#62For $25 a year, I would expect them to have some backup policy!
Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back
#63I keep hearing about this coming up, yet no one ask talked about why the data is irretrievable. What it implies is that the internal tool(s) that the support staff uses was designed to do deletion instead of status changes. I imagine they have a web interface that fires off some backend script which a) runs sql deletes on an account ID and all tables and b) fires off scripts that physically deletes all photos across…
Are you saying that a freemium service should never delete data—or that a customer service rep shouldn't be able to do it?
I can see why Flickr might engineer things this way. Most of their users don't pay (granted, this guy was a pro user). Deleting images when an account is deleted saves money.
Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back
#64"This wasn't much compensation considering Flickr Pro costs $24.95 per year, and Mr. Wilhelm has already received a year's worth of Pro through his participation in some events and competitions.*" what else could flickr have offered to compensate?
I would have asked for something closer to a full refund and possibly a longer, if not lifetime, term of free usage. It's obviously expensive for Flickr to offer something like this but I mean they accidentally deleted 5 years of a paying customers work. I think a refund is the bare minimum.
They have done that bare minimum. Flicker has already provided the guy with five years of hosting and linking - that doesn't just disappear because it's in the past. They provided the service that was paid for over those years.
Now they've made a mistake, and have refunded this years payment and added future access for free. They have done more than 'the bare minimum'. It might be good PR to refund previous years' fees, but they were at the time provided in good faith and competant manner; there is no 'fair exchange' reason to refund them.
Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back
#65I keep hearing about this coming up, yet no one ask talked about why the data is irretrievable. What it implies is that the internal tool(s) that the support staff uses was designed to do deletion instead of status changes. I imagine they have a web interface that fires off some backend script which a) runs sql deletes on an account ID and all tables and b) fires off scripts that physically deletes all photos across…
How should the deletion system be designed?
Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back
#66This is why I never have a DELETE call anywhere in my app or admin code. I always mark as deleted (there are performance improvements in this for some databases as well)
Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back
#67Yahoo seems to be having trouble in general. First there are rumors that they are shutting down Delicious. Now their photo sharing service is starting to show real problems.
(Not to mention the Flickr API has a KNOWN ISSUE with the search that has a fix ETA of several WEEKS! http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157625560721827/)
Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back
#68"This wasn't much compensation considering Flickr Pro costs $24.95 per year, and Mr. Wilhelm has already received a year's worth of Pro through his participation in some events and competitions.*" what else could flickr have offered to compensate?
I would have asked for something closer to a full refund and possibly a longer, if not lifetime, term of free usage. It's obviously expensive for Flickr to offer something like this but I mean they accidentally deleted 5 years of a paying customers work. I think a refund is the bare minimum.
even a lifetime of flickr wouldn't satisfy the authors request for compensation. a few hundred in flickr dollars is not worth thousands of lost photos.
Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an engineering decision - Flikr has to host a large amount of data for very little cost, since most users aren't paying. Space isn't cheap by the Petabyte! The design for a system where you had multiple redundant copies of all the data and could roll back any changes to the data set is different - and would cost a lot more.
Here is what I don't understand. They have multiple redundant copies in case of unlikely scenario of disaster, but they have no copies or protection in case of quite likely scenario of operator error. This seems backward to me. EDIT: I don't believe that Yahoo! Flickr does not have a way to recover these things. Or I'm completely wrong.
Reverting a full db should be straightforward (stop the db server and revert a dump).
For a single account it's more of a pita.
Retrieving all the datas associated with one account, put it in a format readable from the production environment and recommit all the changes while dealing with the potential errors and inconstencies seems quite a huge deal.
Messing unrelated data in the process would also be a nightmare.
Of course, not deleting anything from the start wouod be the way.
Re: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a User's 4,000 Photos and Can't Get Them Back
#70This whole situation points at a market opportunity for a competing service to offer users the ability to backup a real DB dump of their entire user, not just "everything you uploaded", but actually a file that, provided later to the service (or a competing service) contains everything needed to recreate that account.